Father's Table

Parable of our Father's love....

There was a father who had two children, a son and a daughter, and he loved them with the kind of love that has no bottom to it — the kind that doesn’t keep score and doesn’t sleep.

Every Sunday he set a long table with their favorite foods. He lit candles. He put on the old music they grew up with. He just wanted them to come and sit and laugh and eat too much and talk about nothing important.

But the children had gotten an idea in their heads — they weren’t sure where it came from — that their father’s love had to be earned. That the table was a reward, not a gift.

So the son arrived one Sunday carrying a stack of certificates. “Father,” he said, breathing hard, “I completed four online courses this week, I ran a marathon on Thursday, and I’ve drafted a five-year plan for becoming a better person. I have it laminated.” He slid it across the table.

The father looked at him with soft eyes. “Sit down, son. The soup is getting cold.”

“I can’t sit yet. I’m still apologizing for 2011.”

The daughter was no better. She arrived with a spreadsheet of her moral improvements, color-coded by category. She had memorized portions of several holy books. She had given up sugar, irony, and sleeping past five in the morning. She stood at the edge of the table vibrating slightly, waiting to be graded.

“Sweetheart,” the father said, “put the spreadsheet down. There’s bread.”

“But I haven’t yet atoned for the thing in March,” she said.

“Which March?”

She opened a second spreadsheet.

The father sat quietly for a moment. He looked at his two children — his son still presenting laminated documents, his daughter scrolling through a decade of ledgers — and his heart ached, not with disappointment, but with a grief that looked almost like longing.

“Children,” he said finally, and there was something in his voice that made them both go still.

“I paid the debt. All of it. Every entry in that spreadsheet, every March, every 2011. It’s gone. It was taken care of before you even walked in the door. I didn’t set this table because you earned it. I set it because you’re mine and I miss you.”

The son looked down at his certificates. The daughter slowly closed her laptop.

“Then… what do you want from us?” she asked.

The father picked up the bread and broke it and held out a piece to each of them.

“I want you to eat,” he said. “I want to hear about your week. I want to watch you laugh at your brother’s terrible jokes. I want you here — not performing, not auditing yourselves, not running marathons on my behalf. Just here. With me. That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it.”

The son sat down.

The daughter sat down.

And the food was still warm.